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Carriages in the railway age

The last few weeks, I have been looking at weird objects in Britain’s National Railway Museum. There were games. There were hot-water bottles. There were candle-holders that you could take with you on the train, pin onto the fabric of your chair, and light up right there. And before I make it sound like too much of a holiday (though it was, in a way), there were also lots of books to read.

Photo by Oliver Betts.

All this because we are trying to find out more about travellers’ experiences, from the beginnings of our railway system in the 1820s until now.

My host Dr Oli Betts already published an entertaining piece about our project. In it, he points out how much people in the early days had to get used to the railways.

Yet the other side of the story is equally interesting. Existing habits of travel continued to exist. The railways were embedded into older forms of travel.

This is illustrated by another image from Wallis’s ‘Locomotive Game’ of Railroad Adventures, the game Oli Betts describes in his blog post:

Photo by the author (with my apologies for the low image quality. Should have used a tripod).

In the early decades of passenger trains, it was not unusual for the body of a old-fashioned carriage, or even an entire carriage with wheels and all, to be mounted onto a railway carriage. It does not look very safe, but it provided you with the comfort, privacy and respectable appearance of your own carriage and staff. (The Eurotunnel Shuttle has started to do the same again in the twentieth century, this time with automobiles.)

Another example. A matchbox, sold as part of a portable railway reading lamp:

Photo by the author.

But why does this railway accessory depict a coach-and-four? An expression of nostalgia, perhaps? Anti-railway sentiment? A little bit like the acme of wedding chic nowadays is to hire an old timer with chauffeur, or indeed a horse-drawn landau?

That doesn’t quite explain it. The coach passengers are dressed in clothes contemporary to the production of the railway lamp, not pre-railway clothes. If the matchbox was indeed designed specifically to be included in this railway lamp set, then the message must be one of integration. Coaches were not overrun by the railways, but very much held their own, especially on the shorter distance. Trains and coaches coexisted peacefully in the travel imagination. The message conveyed to the user of the reading lamp was that with rail and road transport combined, you could come a long way.

If we do think there is also a degree of nostalgia or romanticism in the image, it is a longing for the country-side; and possibly a yearning for more private forms of transport that did not depend on great quantities of fellow users making the same journey: one thing railway and pre-railway travellers both detested.

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